Existential Shakespeare: Citizenship in the International Service-Learning Classroom

The current resurgence of nationalism in the United States and elsewhere has forced universities to reconsider what Karin Fischer calls the “golden…sheen” of international education (Fischer, How International Education’s Golden Age Lost Its Sheen. The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2019. Retrieved June 10, 2019, from https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/2019-03-28-golden-age , 2019). In such contexts, faculty and administrators can no longer easily assume that either service-learning or international education can fulfill the high-minded ideals of either “global citizenship” or “democratic practice” (Battistoni et al., 2010) anticipated or enjoyed during previous decades. Instead, we turn to smaller goals such as establishing relationships between individual students or to teaching and learning about citizenship in particular national contexts, fraught though such relationships may be with language, administrative, and social difficulties (Hauerwas & Creamer, Engaging with Host Schools to Establish the Reciprocity of an International Teacher Education Partnership. Journal of Higher Education and Engagement, 22(2), 157–188. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/jhe , 2018). Shakespeare turns out to provide what Paul Edmondson and others have called “a protected space for discussing difficult issues” (“Citizen Shakespeare” website, in process), even as we acknowledge its implication in systems of colonial domination, white supremacy, the destruction of indigenous cultures, and rapacious global markets (Joubin, 2020; Demeter, 2020; Plastow, 2020; Fischlin, 2020). Despite or perhaps because of this checkered social and educational history, Shakespeare also turns out to be something of a lingua franca or communicative medium among cultures (Joubin, 2020), much as folk-tale and television shows (what Wai-Chee Dimock has called “low-epic,” 2013) can similarly traverse linguistic and national boundaries. This essay details the challenges and rewards of a three-year international partnership between the University of Georgia and the Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 that culminated not only in research publications but also in partnerships and a visit and lesson from UPVM3 faculty and students to a Title 1 Middle School in North Georgia and a visit and lesson from UGA faculty and students to a collège with many students from “underprivileged” backgrounds in the South of France. Although students in both countries appreciated the enlarged perspectives afforded by the partnership, we noticed, ironically, that the French students who learnt about citizenship through acting Shakespeare itself engaged more passionately with their learning environment and their own agency than the US students, who were restricted by changes in administrative policy and staff to a curriculum that discouraged “acting out” scenes from historical literature in favor of readings and discussions of current events. We conclude with a plea for what we are calling existential Shakespeare—a Shakespeare that is constantly reinvented and recreated by students within their classrooms, wherever they are in the world.